My friends and I are basically functional alcoholics. But no one wants to admit it. 

I’ve always had a love hate relationship with alcohol. From sipping sherry, aged four, on my grandfather’s knee to the theme tune of Coronation Street (once helping myself to one of the miniature teacups that hung from the sherry barrel, swiftly moved too high for my infant grasp) to tasting my mother’s vintage wine, I always loved the strong rich flavours and burning sensation of booze. But from my first sensation of slight drunkenness as a teenager, I’ve never much liked the feeling of being out of control.

In my early twenties, I discovered the joys of white spirits, less fattening than wine or beer, which had rounded my cheeks and belly travelling the Southern Hemisphere. A vodka lime and soda kept me relatively sober and lucid until the point at which I would pass out. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. At uni, drinking was a game we all indulged in, normalising it, helping us, still awkward from teenage hormones, to socialise. Some fell prey to darker vices; and of course, at work, by which I mean, back then and for my sins, twirling round a pole, where it was practically mandatory. I always veered on the side of caution, not wanting to do myself an injury, or make the mistake of confusing work and play; with my friends, there were always those who were drunker than me. I surrounded myself by reprobates to maintain the higher moral ground, drawn, like so many with a fragmented background to seek solace in nihilism, as long as there was always someone else worse off than me to keep my pecker, and my stamina up.

Gradually one or two of them grew up, went on the wagon, and we fell out of touch, though not just because they no longer made me feel better about my own love of the sauce. Likewise, I had babies, and opportunities to get off my face fell by the wayside. But if any mum cracked open the vino to while away another knackered play date, I was always among the first to get a glass. Eventually, my mum friends too, were the reprobates, the ones who made less pretence to be perfect than others who made me somehow feel less together.

Don’t get me wrong, I always stay in control, more or less, but like a moth to a flame, I remained drawn to those who sometimes don’t. After another boozy weekend, where I drank with mums already drunk on sunshine and Pimms from yet another summer fayre, I felt po-faced when I turned up relatively sober, though felt rather less so when they were visibly drunk amid the kids. Not that I can talk. I tend to hide from them when I’m half cut, rather than slur my way through bedtime, and I have friends who confine their drinking to days when the kids are out of sight and out of mind, but who tend to go rather overboard when they do.

Last night was no exception. My sometime childminder slash best friend Reprobate Kate stayed for G and Ts when her daughter was picked up by her dad, as we paddled in the paddling pool she’d played in with the kids until I got home. With my husband away, I needed to be on top of it, but yet somehow I didn’t, opening first one, then another bottle of wine, imploring her to stay. It being hot, she’d popped the kids to bed in my room with a fan on, and so when I toddled to bed myself, wobbly and already ruing the morning only to wake fuzzy and too early, to find myself breathing hangover all over my sleeping tots. I realised, this time, it had gone too far.

I dragged myself up, went downstairs to put on the dishwasher to find my friend had carefully tidied up, so no trace would greet them when they awoke, save a smiley face and kisses on the blackboard for me to find and cheer me through the day. That is my cut off. If I drink, then the children must not suffer for it; the house, if not my complexion, immaculate the morning after.

The thing is, booze has brought me great friends, the ones who, like me, need people to be vulnerable among – even if the memories haven’t always been so long lasting. My relationship with alcohol, though I may oft regret it, will continue unabated, albeit curtailed on Mondays and Tuesdays and sometimes Thursday, to help my liver keep pace.

Because drunk, I am, temporarily lively, gregarious, friendly, happy and sometimes inspired. My hangovers are less frightening than once they were because I have my tricks to get me through the day. Now, they are productive, contrite, and sometimes profound.

I drink, therefore I am, because it reminds me I’m alive, even though, like all of us drinkers, I might sometimes do it to simply forget.